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Edward Herrmann had collapsed at the studio in New York, and no one knew why. The actor had arrived to record his narrator part for Ken Burns' latest documentary epic for PBS, "Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies." The three-part, six-hour film, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, traces the story of the disease from its earliest accounts in ancient Egypt to the latest scientific breakthroughs and their impact on real-life patients. Herrmann, a favorite collaborator of Burns', was helped up by colleagues after he had crumpled to the floor and was soon back at the microphone. "But during the break, he came back into the...

Related "Columbia University" Articles

Edward Herrmann had collapsed at the studio in New York, and no one knew why.
The actor had arrived to record his narrator part for Ken Burns' latest documentary epic for PBS, "Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies." The three-part, six-hour...

A descendant of the wife of Hong Yen Chang was researching a book about an ancestor when she learned that her great-grand-uncle Chang had received a law degree but never practiced in California.
She contacted another relative, who spoke to a historian at...

With President Obama expected to choose the site for his library in coming months, Chicagoans have been engaged in a bitter fight over a proposal to place it in a public park. But this is not the first time a presidential library has been at the center of...

In a meteorological twist, heat rising off urban sprawl is driving a trend toward fewer annual summer invasions of dense overcast known as June gloom in coastal Southern California areas, a new climate study says.
The study led by bioclimatologist A....

When Eric Garcetti won the 2013 mayoral election, he did so without the financial backing of Psomas, a Los Angeles-based engineering firm with offices throughout the Southwest. As a company that held contracts worth more than $100,000 with the city,...

Science just served up a double coupon for the argumentative: A new study suggests that climate change is driving a Middle East conflict that brought the Islamic State to prominence.
Climate change contributed to the severity of a record-setting...

Orrin Keepnews, a Grammy-winning music producer and writer who recorded and worked closely with such well-known jazz artists as Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley and Wes Montgomery, died Sunday at his home in El...

As a schoolgirl in the 1930s, Eugenie Clark spent countless hours pressed up to the tanks at a New York City aquarium, absorbed by the alligators, sea turtles and hundreds of species of fish just beyond the glass.
There was one creature, however, that...

On the waterfront seven miles from UC Berkeley, the university owns what is now an isolated and somewhat ramshackle collection of storage facilities and labs. But Berkeley's chancellor envisions it as a future showcase for international education.
The...

He's getting sappy on college campuses, wringing his hands about his tuition savings plan and waxing nostalgic about his own years as an undergraduate.
President Obama is hurtling toward a deadline that looms over him much like the end of his time in...

Physicist Val Fitch was not a lawbreaker, but he is famous for broken laws.
In a classic 1960s series of experiments, Fitch and his Princeton University colleague James Cronin proved that one of the key laws of physics hitherto thought immutable — that...

If you're dead serious about politics, consider this: A new paper finds that people with conservative ideologies were more likely to die in the study period than their liberal peers.
The findings, published by the Journal of Epidemiology &...

Global warming will bring the "unprecedented" risk of a decades-long mega-drought in the American Southwest and Great Plains during the second half of the century, researchers claim.
The forecast, which was published online Thursday...

Engineers have taken an ordinary smartphone and made it a whole lot smarter.
They created a compact, handheld device that plugs into an iPhone and turns it into a mobile laboratory that can diagnose HIV and syphilis in just 15 minutes.
The diagnostic...

Early in "Still Alice," Julianne Moore — as wife, mother and professor Alice Howland — faces a series of cognitive tests administered by her neurologist. She's begun forgetting things ranging from simple words to her location, and mistakenly...

As Cuba and the United States prepare for their next landmark meeting in Washington, the future of their relations, at least in the short term and at the critical nuts-and-bolts level, rests in the hands of two veteran female diplomats.
They are not...

Actor and author James Franco, who is rapidly becoming the Energizer Bunny of cinema, has announced the main cast for yet another film: an adaptation of John Steinbeck's 1936 novel "In Dubious Battle."
According to the Hollywood Reporter,...

Charles Townes, the Columbia University physicist who transformed modern society with his invention of the maser and the laser, receiving the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics for his effort, has died. He was 99.
Townes, who had been in failing health, died...

William Woestendiek, an editor who led Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper investigations before ending his career as director of the USC school of journalism, died Friday at a Mesa, Ariz., nursing facility after a long illness, his family said. He was...

Has the thought of swerving your car into oncoming traffic ever popped into your head? What about the thought of a stranger, nude? Or sliding a knife into someone's gut? As David Adam reports in "The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a...